15 May 2019
Google Announces New Discovery Ads Format

Google has unveiled a number of new advertising products at this year’s Google Marketing Live event. Among them was the announcement of the new Discovery Ads format. Brad Bender, Product VP for Google Display & Video Ads, declared that discovery was “a key theme this year” – and Google delivered.

The product announcements targeted visually-focused, automated ad products, created with top-of-funnel consumers in mind. Discovery ads are no different, and they’re making waves in the digital world. Read on to find out why.

What are Discovery ads?

You might be surprised by this, but many of us look at the Google Discover feed multiple times a day, even if we couldn’t name exactly where to find it. Google’s Discover feed is built into Android home-screens, the Google iOS app, and can also be found on Google’s homepage – but only through mobile devices.

This means Discovery ads are a mobile initiative. Discovery ads are native advertisements that appear across the many different environments that the Discover feed exists in. Their roll-out will be limited to select geographic locations initially, so we may not see them in New Zealand for a while.

When we do though, they’ll be ‘visually rich,’ and use the ‘power of intent’, according to Google. Power of intent in this context translates to ‘based on your data’. This means search history, app downloads, and more. Technically, this is nothing new – it’s the same data Google uses for many other marketing products.

The difference is that the Discover feed hasn’t been monetised before – this is an entirely new arena for advertising. Opening it up to ad placement is bound to be a gold rush for marketers, as mobile devices continue to hold the position as the frontier of the digital marketing space.

How do Discovery ads work?

Similarly to other Google ad products, advertisers need only to make a Discovery campaign, input creative assets and then leave it to Google to combine them in the best possible ways thanks to machine learning. These campaigns will be charged on a cost-per-click basis.

From there, an advertiser waits for the ads to be served to the approximate 800 million worldwide users that regularly see the Discover feed.

What’s more, the Discover feed isn’t the only place Discovery ads will be served – they’re also planned to appear in the mobile YouTube Feed, alongside recommended videos, and in Gmail alongside banner ads.

Sam Mannell has been a writer for the Pure SEO content team since August '18. He quickly found his place in the company as resident Dungeon Master and coffee expert. Sam holds a BA from University of Auckland, where he double-majored in Linguistics and English.

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